week
my weekend's not over yet, so i might do an additional update this evening, but i have so much on my mind, it's crazy.
this week has officially been the crappiest week i can remember. i guess everything turned out okay at the very end, but i still paid a heavy price for it. i admit, i didn't have anyone to run to or sympathize for me [aside from michael, who gets all my bitching. sorry] because i really brought it all upon myself.
i guess it was just that last weekend was busy as hell, and i had many assignments to complete that took at least 3 hours at a time. this week, i've had to come up with a physics lab, a bio lab, an iop, and debate cases. when you add to this random assignments from classes, 2 nights of soccer, and wednesday's tate lecture and movie, i had too much to do in too little time. sleep averaged out to be 2.5 hours a night.
my dad talked to my counselor because he didn't believe that i had this much work. he was like, "what kind of bullshit classes are you taking that require you to forego sleep?" my teachers pulled me out of classes and talked to me. they want me to quit something. their workload really isn't harmful... unless you're like me and you "do too much" they told my dad i needed to manage my time better. i felt so horrible, because again, this was all my fault for not having done it before, and it makes other people unhappy and worried. i told them i had it under control. i always have it under control.
friday i presented my iop which i started around 11 the night before and finished at 3. and ms. zembower thought i couldn't even do it in one weekend. well, it turned out to last 14 m 58 s. talk about luck. friday was horrible, though. my dad was right. not sleeping was hurting me, and i was pretty sick. i threw up in first period, and to add insult to injury... i had to give my iop 4th period with a blood-stained skirt. i know you didn't want to know that, but from now on, THAT will be my most embarassing moment ever. but my english class was really nice to me. even the guys sympathized with their silence. i had called my mom and asked her to pull me out of 4th period at 2 so that i could go to compsci and finish my french journals and write a better neg case. she brought me some tylenol and a change of clothes as well. thanks mom. so after finding mahmood and jeff, i went to the compsci room. they typed me up a short neg case while i wrote french journals. i couldn't use it though, because it was too short. but it was really sweet of them to do that.
we drove to plano east, where the tournament was. this is plano's ib school. i hear ib gets no support here. the ib kids have to go to zero hour [early extra class] to get all their classes in, whereas everyone else just goes to 7 classes. the ib kids don't get lunch either; they have to eat during class. but ib is a lot easier here, too. the funny thing is that plano people consider plano east to be "ghetto". okay, assholes, since your school has a gigantic duck pond with a bridge over it, looks like an office park, is less than 10 years old, and gives OUR school that robin hood money you're always bitching about. i can't wait until they come to our school's tournament.
so i had to debate full of tylenol and not having eating all day. i was pretty surprised that i didn't faint. i had 3 rounds of novice ld that evening. i won all 3, but that wasn't supposed to be a big deal at all; people kept telling me that novices sucked and that they expected me to win. no pressure there at all [...], especially since this was my first tournament doing ld, and that i have actually only done two practice rounds in the past and observed one. took mahmood, eric, and jeff home, and just slept. i love sleep.
in the morning i had to leave really early for extemp. this was my second tournament to extemp. last tournament i won novice extemp, so ms. forbes told me that i should do varsity; "it's not that different". my first extemp speech wasn't bad at all. it was about why israel should withdraw entirely from the west bank. i got 2nd in my room. but my next speech was horrible. it had to do with the euro and europe's economy. i don't know anything about money. i got 5th out of 6 in my room. so i missed breaking by 1 point. better luck next time i guess.
the rest of the day was occupied by four ld rounds. i lost the first one, but i really thought i should've won it based on values. after all, i ran eric's awesome affirmative case that he'd practically written for me. my judge didn't even log the arguments, so he didn't know what was going on. what an idiot. they usually don't take care in selecting novice judges.
because i had lost that 4th round, i was seeded 11th out of 16 in octo-finals. in octo-finals, i met with this short, whiny little kid who was a real asshole to me. the kid was a freshman from shepton, one of those feeder schools into plano west. and there was a shepton kid in every round, so it was concievable that they could close out any of the rounds after this one. he was really stuck up, and everyone told me, "ooo he's really good! watch out" damn, the kid was good. and he tried to be all fancy and use stupid unnecessary elevated language, like he changed every word with the thesaurus function on word. but again, i just tore up his value and criterion, and won based on that. because i have to admit, my neg case was HORRIBLE. i wrote it in one evening, and didn't really have a chance to make serious revisions to it.
on to quarters. i won that with that badass affirmative case. i really owe eric [mclester, that is. he was the one who wrote it. and he went to the tournament; fritsche didn't]
and semis. well, it was all over then. my neg case sucked, i did my best to fight her value and criterion since it was the only thing i could do. but i lost 2-1. and all three judges agreed that they wanted to vote against me because i was "mean" i wasted her cx time by making up elaborate answers to her questions, and i was pretty snappy. but i was taught to do that for cx in mock trial, so i thought it applied to debate as well. guess i was wrong. the first voted based on my usual strategy. the other two voted against me because she had "proven" that the right to privacy didn't exist. even though i was pretty sure that i had proven it did. oh well, eric and jeff were watching, and eric said that she was a better debater, and that i shouldve won but only because i had voters and she brought up new arguments in hers. i was really upset, but eric was right. congrats to her. mahmood, jeff, marcos, chris, and i went out to dinner at chili's afterward. talking to jeff made me feel a lot better. i'm really upset that the seniors will be gone next year [and mahmood at the semester!!] but at least i'll still have jeff to talk to.
well, i really did have fun this evening spending time with the debate folks. debate is really fun and satisfying. i don't take it seriously enough in the sense that i should make good use of class time and work harder, but i also think that i take it too seriously in that i take a loss as a slap to my intelligence. after losing that semis round and failing to break in extemp, i felt like it was a result of mediocre intelligence. and i realized, becoming an awesome debater like our seniors, eric, mahmood, eric, and megan takes a lot of time. i don't know if i can make up for anything in the little time i have left to debate.
i got a wonderful 12 hours of sleep. and today looks like a busy day too. here we go again. the beginning of a new six weeks and a new cycle of fighting to catch up on homework.
this week has officially been the crappiest week i can remember. i guess everything turned out okay at the very end, but i still paid a heavy price for it. i admit, i didn't have anyone to run to or sympathize for me [aside from michael, who gets all my bitching. sorry] because i really brought it all upon myself.
i guess it was just that last weekend was busy as hell, and i had many assignments to complete that took at least 3 hours at a time. this week, i've had to come up with a physics lab, a bio lab, an iop, and debate cases. when you add to this random assignments from classes, 2 nights of soccer, and wednesday's tate lecture and movie, i had too much to do in too little time. sleep averaged out to be 2.5 hours a night.
my dad talked to my counselor because he didn't believe that i had this much work. he was like, "what kind of bullshit classes are you taking that require you to forego sleep?" my teachers pulled me out of classes and talked to me. they want me to quit something. their workload really isn't harmful... unless you're like me and you "do too much" they told my dad i needed to manage my time better. i felt so horrible, because again, this was all my fault for not having done it before, and it makes other people unhappy and worried. i told them i had it under control. i always have it under control.
friday i presented my iop which i started around 11 the night before and finished at 3. and ms. zembower thought i couldn't even do it in one weekend. well, it turned out to last 14 m 58 s. talk about luck. friday was horrible, though. my dad was right. not sleeping was hurting me, and i was pretty sick. i threw up in first period, and to add insult to injury... i had to give my iop 4th period with a blood-stained skirt. i know you didn't want to know that, but from now on, THAT will be my most embarassing moment ever. but my english class was really nice to me. even the guys sympathized with their silence. i had called my mom and asked her to pull me out of 4th period at 2 so that i could go to compsci and finish my french journals and write a better neg case. she brought me some tylenol and a change of clothes as well. thanks mom. so after finding mahmood and jeff, i went to the compsci room. they typed me up a short neg case while i wrote french journals. i couldn't use it though, because it was too short. but it was really sweet of them to do that.
we drove to plano east, where the tournament was. this is plano's ib school. i hear ib gets no support here. the ib kids have to go to zero hour [early extra class] to get all their classes in, whereas everyone else just goes to 7 classes. the ib kids don't get lunch either; they have to eat during class. but ib is a lot easier here, too. the funny thing is that plano people consider plano east to be "ghetto". okay, assholes, since your school has a gigantic duck pond with a bridge over it, looks like an office park, is less than 10 years old, and gives OUR school that robin hood money you're always bitching about. i can't wait until they come to our school's tournament.
so i had to debate full of tylenol and not having eating all day. i was pretty surprised that i didn't faint. i had 3 rounds of novice ld that evening. i won all 3, but that wasn't supposed to be a big deal at all; people kept telling me that novices sucked and that they expected me to win. no pressure there at all [...], especially since this was my first tournament doing ld, and that i have actually only done two practice rounds in the past and observed one. took mahmood, eric, and jeff home, and just slept. i love sleep.
in the morning i had to leave really early for extemp. this was my second tournament to extemp. last tournament i won novice extemp, so ms. forbes told me that i should do varsity; "it's not that different". my first extemp speech wasn't bad at all. it was about why israel should withdraw entirely from the west bank. i got 2nd in my room. but my next speech was horrible. it had to do with the euro and europe's economy. i don't know anything about money. i got 5th out of 6 in my room. so i missed breaking by 1 point. better luck next time i guess.
the rest of the day was occupied by four ld rounds. i lost the first one, but i really thought i should've won it based on values. after all, i ran eric's awesome affirmative case that he'd practically written for me. my judge didn't even log the arguments, so he didn't know what was going on. what an idiot. they usually don't take care in selecting novice judges.
because i had lost that 4th round, i was seeded 11th out of 16 in octo-finals. in octo-finals, i met with this short, whiny little kid who was a real asshole to me. the kid was a freshman from shepton, one of those feeder schools into plano west. and there was a shepton kid in every round, so it was concievable that they could close out any of the rounds after this one. he was really stuck up, and everyone told me, "ooo he's really good! watch out" damn, the kid was good. and he tried to be all fancy and use stupid unnecessary elevated language, like he changed every word with the thesaurus function on word. but again, i just tore up his value and criterion, and won based on that. because i have to admit, my neg case was HORRIBLE. i wrote it in one evening, and didn't really have a chance to make serious revisions to it.
on to quarters. i won that with that badass affirmative case. i really owe eric [mclester, that is. he was the one who wrote it. and he went to the tournament; fritsche didn't]
and semis. well, it was all over then. my neg case sucked, i did my best to fight her value and criterion since it was the only thing i could do. but i lost 2-1. and all three judges agreed that they wanted to vote against me because i was "mean" i wasted her cx time by making up elaborate answers to her questions, and i was pretty snappy. but i was taught to do that for cx in mock trial, so i thought it applied to debate as well. guess i was wrong. the first voted based on my usual strategy. the other two voted against me because she had "proven" that the right to privacy didn't exist. even though i was pretty sure that i had proven it did. oh well, eric and jeff were watching, and eric said that she was a better debater, and that i shouldve won but only because i had voters and she brought up new arguments in hers. i was really upset, but eric was right. congrats to her. mahmood, jeff, marcos, chris, and i went out to dinner at chili's afterward. talking to jeff made me feel a lot better. i'm really upset that the seniors will be gone next year [and mahmood at the semester!!] but at least i'll still have jeff to talk to.
well, i really did have fun this evening spending time with the debate folks. debate is really fun and satisfying. i don't take it seriously enough in the sense that i should make good use of class time and work harder, but i also think that i take it too seriously in that i take a loss as a slap to my intelligence. after losing that semis round and failing to break in extemp, i felt like it was a result of mediocre intelligence. and i realized, becoming an awesome debater like our seniors, eric, mahmood, eric, and megan takes a lot of time. i don't know if i can make up for anything in the little time i have left to debate.
i got a wonderful 12 hours of sleep. and today looks like a busy day too. here we go again. the beginning of a new six weeks and a new cycle of fighting to catch up on homework.